What I learned about Comcast
A father-son duo; The Building Blocks of Comcast’s Evolutionary Success…
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name Comcast? Well, let me tell you my story.
The mention of Comcast always takes me back to this day when I attended the 10th anniversary of the Global Tsinghua forum. On this day, Brian Roberts, the son of Ralph Roberts, founder of the second-largest broadcasting and cable television company in the world by revenue, Comcast Corporation attended this forum in which he engaged in a quite informative dialogue.
I was in attendance as part of my coursework and wrote an article about the forum which follows below.
At times, family businesses fail to become a success because either children aren’t willing to take over or business gets thrown down the gauntlet. However, for young Brian Roberts, although he was very fond of numbers, emulating his father growing up and aspiring to work with him was number one. When Ralph Roberts founded his company, Comcast, in his forties back in 1963, he was seemingly paving way for his son, Brian Roberts who is now CEO and Chairman of Comcast NBCUniversal.
“His dream was to pass the business on,” adds Brian Roberts at the 10th anniversary of the Global Tsinghua forum.
At four years old Roberts only wanted to do one thing with his life which was to work for his father.
“The fantasy versus the reality may have been different but when I went to work for him it was a wonderful experience all these years,” said Roberts.
Straight after graduating from Harvard in 1991, Brian Roberts joined his father in building one of the largest broadcasting and cable television company in the world by revenue, Comcast. He moved to four different cities over several years, Michigan, New Jersey, Texas and Pennsylvania in various operating jobs and learned and got an understanding of what made Comcast different than IBM or General Motors.
His father wanted him to learn how to do every job beyond the finance field that included understanding customer service and learning how computers work. Through managerial positions he got placed within the company, Brian Roberts got to make decisions at a young age but he also learned the value of not being carried away by that sense of authority.
“What my father gave me the opportunity to bear in mind is the need to have a culture that connects people to make decisions and not have a company where every decision is made by one person,” said Roberts.
Not only that but Ralph Roberts was the kind of boss whom people gravitated towards to, giving reassurance to his employees as well as creating many opportunities for them, in turn making the company better. Allowing one to take credit for a great work done was one telling management technique that Brian and his father employed which Brian believes has helped them in recruiting some of the best executives in business to work and stay in Comcast. This he believes has made employees feel like they’re the boss of their area.
From its humble beginnings, Comcast served as the only operating cable television company in America.
“For the first twenty years, there was no competition and what we were doing was inventing a new category. There was no cable television and all these entrepreneurs built the industry,” said Roberts.
A few years later in 1995, they started a technology lab and in 1997, Microsoft’s Bill Gates paid the largest investment they ever made at that time as a minority investor by putting one billion dollars in Comcast.
“We’ve always had a sense of we’re not a small company and that we were trying to become a larger company,” said Roberts.
Taking risks, one acquisition at a time with the sense of optimism, conservatism blend together somehow with skepticism and paranoia are some of the ingredients that helped grow Comcast. Despite his worrisome sense of paranoia, Brian Roberts admired his father’s optimism which he believes made Comcast what it is today.
“If you’re in the technology business, a healthy sense of paranoia I think it’s credible,” said Brian Roberts.
Today Comcast NBCUniversal attracts 25 million internet and 22 million television customers. From the olden days when his father was running a community antenna, Comcast has evolved and shifted from an antenna business to a television and internet business. The company is uniquely positioned at the intersection of media and technology with two primary businesses; Comcast and NBCUniversal. Its television business booms through NBCUniversal which features various shows such as the recent number one American drama “THIS IS US” and among the popular talk shows “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.”
“We thrived because we have been willing to reinvent ourselves constantly with that sense of purgatorial,” said Brian Roberts.
